Entre denunciar y aguantar. Sojización, plaguicidas y participación en salud ambiental en Uruguay

Abstract

Since the beginning of the 2000s, an expansion of transgenic soybean cultivation has been developed in the Southerncone, which has implied an exponential increase in the volumes of pesticides used in the region. The analysis of socio-environmental conflicts has emphasized the social resistance of the various problems that this production model entails. Uruguay, although less visible in international debates, was not alien to this process. This article aims to introduce the Uruguayan case in the regional debate on the problems caused by the expansion of pesticides associated with the advance of soybean and to discuss the possibilities of social participation in environmental health as a form of resistance. The methodology combines an ethnographic study in the agricultural nucleus of the country with documentary analysis. The results are discussed in the light of critical medical anthropology, showing that although reports are mechanisms that allow public visibility of the problems caused by the use of pesticides, within the framework of hegemony-subalternity relations that structure social relations in an agrarian economy, the scope and limits of social participation in environmental health transcend them.